Even with Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ryan Reynolds attached as astronauts in distress, this one never reaches orbit, and instead achieves only a template trajectory.
Six crew members on the International Space Station discover a single-cell organism among recent samples from Mars. What starts out as a wondrous moment, the meeting of intelligent life forms, quickly becomes another bug hunt, when everyone freaks out.
The astronauts get popped off one by one, as the rapidly adaptable alien known as Calvin, decides the crew is expendable.
The creature effects are decent, giving Calvin a gliding tadpole-starfish-octopoid fluidity through the thin atmosphere as it chases down its prey.
Unfortunately, it’s not frightening, so there’s no tension at play, even as the two survivors race for the escape pods on a space station that’s set for self destruction.
As silver linings go, Life is at least good to look at. The modeling and effects techs do a bang-up job. The International Space Station as both a vast and miraculous piece of technology, and a potential tomb that’s getting smaller all the time.
To his credit, director Daniel Espinosa handles the effects deftly, but the script by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick is a lemon, unfolding in all-too-familiar fashion—with one exception.
The end of Life is not a happy one. Is it worth sitting through the rest for a mighty grim payoff?
Perhaps Florida filmmaker Joseph Mazzafero was anticipating negative reviews?
I actually saw Scathing several years ago but somehow the memory didn’t burn bright enough for me to recollect, whilst sifting through Tubi’s generous inventory of low-budget indie horror.
Rebellious teen Amanda (Allie Sparks) is lured out of her house at 3am by horny boyfriend Adam (Michael Frascino) and driven out to a secluded petting spot for an all-night make-out sesh.
Upon awakening, still knackered from too much tonsil hockey, they discover that the car won’t start, so Adam calls his buddy Steve (Chris Shepardson) to come and fix it.
Steve soon arrives with Daisy Duke-clad Stephanie (Paola Duque), and after declaring Adam’s car “a piece of shit” proceeds to get stoned and tell a long stupid joke about a cat.
The cast is then set upon by a very tall, long-haired dude in a welder’s helmet (John Kyle), who makes short work of Steve and carries Stephanie off to the wood shop for some sicky-icky torture porn that culminates in a spike through the forehead.
While the killer takes Stephanie apart, Adam and Amanda await their turn locked in the car. For like three days. No food, no water, no pee, no poop.
The idea that the maniac might return at any moment causes paralysis of the mind and body, apparently. Couldn’t they have just run for it?
Too risky, I guess.
Adam finally grows a spine and steps out of the car—and is immediately taken by the towering weirdo back to the shed for an extreme vasectomy, the results of which are proudly displayed by the giant to the gawking Amanda.
There are plenty more lurid twists afoot in Scathing, and you can find them in Wrong Turn and Psycho. Here then is a buffet of bone basic brutality, that includes a baby in the microwave, with a WTF ending that doesn’t clarify shit.
Does the killer get away? It doesn’t matter, because you won’t.
What Lives Here, a gore-strewn bloodbath about a hapless moving company hired to clear out a haunted house, is co-written (along with his wife Michele), directed, and starring New Jersey construction boss Troy Burbank, who deserves mention alongside other inspired dilettante filmmakers.
I can’t help but think of Harold P. Warren, the Texas fertilizer salesman responsible for Manos: The Hands of Fate, for instance, or welder Anthony Cardoza partnering up with Coleman Francis to make stupefying entertainment like The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961) and Red Zone Cuba (1966).
For a paltry $25,000, Burbank and a bunch of his friends filmed in and around the Strauss Mansion in Atlantic Highlands for 10 days and the result is What Lives Here, a movie that takes its sweet time about getting anywhere, but erupts with enough bloody mayhem to justify its existence.
There is a story here, about evil twins escaping from a mental hospital and taking up residence in the very house that Lee Duncan (Jeff Swanton) and his band of blue-collar boobs are scheduled to clean out.
But let’s not rush into anything. First, Duncan and his men have to drive from Pennsylvania to New Jersey for the job. This means stopping at a crummy dive bar to eat cheeseburgers for like eight minutes.
One character uses this opportunity to “go take a piss.” And the camera follows him!
Then they arrive at the mansion, and immediately leave again to go get something to eat, leading to another long sequence of beer drinking and crap dialogue.
Meanwhile, a delivery man and a nosy teen stop by and fall victim to one of the murderous grannies running amok in the old house that also very obviously serves as a local historical society, since there are glass display cases and newspaper clippings in every room!
The movers themselves and the Barfly Bettys they meet at the second bar and bring home to be eviscerated, are beer-swilling, working-class zeroes that have nothing on their minds but sex, food, and a paycheck, by gawd.
In other words, easy pickings for old ladies in their nightgowns. Indeed, the deaths carry What Lives Here, as the makeup effects of bodies being hammered, stabbed, and sliced, are actually worth sitting through the abundant blue-collar B-roll.
Even a construction boss director knows you’ve got to deliver the gross goods, or get outta the horror business.
Somewhere in Eastern Europe, government forces are battling insurgents in an unending cycle of carnage.
In Outpost, Hunt (Julian Wadham), a determined financier employs mercenary captain DC (Ray Stevenson) and a band of “hired swords” to accompany him on a hazardous mission to retrieve a piece of Nazi hardware from an underground compound.
Shortly after securing the site, the soldiers find themselves under attack by an unseen enemy, one that can seemingly appear and disappear at will, which makes for a very nervous company.
Meanwhile, Hunt has found his infernal device, risking life and limb to jumpstart an ancient contraption in order to control undead Nazi hordes that are rapidly regrouping on the ground floor.
“You said that that machine of yours was made to control them?” DC shouts at Hunt.
“Not control, contain,” Hunt says. “But they obviously got the maths wrong.”
Director and cowriter Steve Barker correctly understands that Germany’s rumored use of occult practices toward the end of the war is a well-stocked pond of possibilities, and makes the most of it.
After a slow start, Outpost gains momentum as the mercenaries realize they’re up against an opponent beyond their comprehension—an army of teleporting super soldiers that have held their position since the end of the Second World War.
Backcountry, written and directed by Toronto filmmaker Adam McDonald (Pyewacket), is based on a true story, and serves as a perfect illustration as to why couples in crisis should avoid the great outdoors.
Relationships are already subject to unimaginable stressors at the moment, from within and without. The idea that some magical symbiosis will take place around a campfire or running terrified through tall timber is laughably naive.
This captivating notion is dangled in front of the endangered duo as they paddle their canoe into a wilderness that is indeed beautiful. They even pass a happy, smiling mirror-image couple in their own canoe, heading back to civilization.
Sweetheart yuppies Alex (Jeff Roop) and Jenn (Missy Peregrym) are on a camping trip in a remote Canadian park. So far, so good.
Like most men in charge of movie expeditions, Alex is a poor choice for leadership. After arrogantly dismissing the need for a map, he gets them lost in a rogue black bear’s feeding ground.
For about the first 40 minutes, Backcountry is more of a relationship on the rocks/adventure film—until the bear enters the picture.
Once blood is shed, it’s buckle-up survival horror that explodes with very valid and very real terror on a painfully primordial level.
McDonald accentuates the panicky state of affairs with dizzying rotation shots that emphasize the lack of familiar landmarks and the growing uncertainty of Alex and Jenn.
The last third of Backcountry is super intense and frightening, because we have traveled a fair distance with these characters and their relatable idiosyncrasies, and a definite emotional investment has been made on our part.
While Alex apologizes for the umpteenth time, for getting them into this mess, Jenn tries to soothe his guilt, by telling him, “Could be worse. At least we’re together.”
It gets worse. Backcountry is a tense place to pitch your tent.
Somewhere amidst a monsoon of nature insert shots, filmmaker Edwin S. Brown managed to cobble together The Prey, a tedious Dead Camper drama of the sort that turned up in plentitude post Friday The 13th.
This isn’t a buried treasure or an overlooked gem. The Prey has more padding than the Philadelphia Eagles.
If you were to take a shot of whiskey each time Brown cuts away from the actors to show spiders, snakes, millipedes, ants, vultures, woodpeckers, frogs, and other woodland creatures, you will be unconscious long before the scarred giant killer (Carel Struycken, Lurch from The Addams Family) appears on the screen.
We can tell he’s there, though. His stupid heartbeat thumps wildly every few minutes. Just the heartbeat. Saves time and money on makeup (and tension).
As it stands, we get to know three vapid couples on a wilderness getaway being stalked by the mysterious survivor of a long ago forest fire.
The choices that Edwin Brown makes in order to further the plot can be blamed on the wee budget, with a chunk of change undoubtedly going to pay Jackie Coogan (Uncle Fester from a different The Addams Family) in his final film role as Ranger Lester Tile, who burns up the screen eating a cucumber sandwich in one the movie’s most pivotal scenes.
For sheer artistic goofiness, Brown’s decision to feature Ranger Mark O’Brien (Jackson Bostwick) playing a lengthy banjo solo and telling one of the world’s oldest (and slowest) jokes to a deer, demonstrates considerable artistic chutzpah in a rather barren entertainment landscape.
The anemic narrative actually gets pepped up when Joel (Steve Bond) shares the ancient tale of The Monkey’s Paw around the campfire. To his credit, he tells it reasonably well.
The only time The Prey gets truly horrifying is the ending, as Final Girl Nancy (Debbie Thureson) gets carried away to a cave to start a family with a huge murderous freak.
That’s some bullshit. No way she deserved that! But perhaps that’s why Edwin Brown included so many unpleasant shots of critters eating each other—it’s all part of nature’s eternal cycle of death and renewal.
You may know him as Brendan Deslaurier, the mega-sensitive male midwife from The Mindy Project, or as Pete Eckhart, a member of The League, a raunchy dude sit-com that ran for six years on FX network.
Creep is also funny, but in a really uncomfortable way. It’s a found-footage duet with director Patrick Brice, in which Duplass is Josef, a terminally ill man spending a day with hired videographer Aaron (Brice), on hand to document Josef’s farewell statements to his unborn son, Buddy.
From the moment Aaron accepts the job, driving way out hell and gone to a remote cabin in the woods, things just get gradually weirder and darker, his unease growing like a pea plant.
Josef turns out to be a human hurricane of passive/aggressive tactics, finding every opportunity to frighten Aaron, and then quickly apologize for his increasingly bizarre behavior.
Push and pull back. Push and pull back. It becomes a dance between the two men, as Josef tells Aaron disturbing stories about his life and wife, as they wander through the woods, eat pancakes at a diner, and return to Josef’s cabin.
Aaron, the consummate professional, is rattled by Josef’s manner that oscillates between pledges of warm friendship and frozen moments of cold confession that should be setting off screaming alarm bells in the head of someone with more common sense.
After having spent the day with Josef, he’s in a hurry to get home and work on the footage—or more likely to escape his merry menacing employer.
Sadly, like Chris Washington in Get Out, Aaron can’t find his car keys.
Josef is many things, chief among them a manipulative predator, but he is also a conflicted artist exploring his (romantic?) feelings for Aaron—and indeed the rest of humanity—by making his own films about the people he meets, that he keeps stored like treasured mementos.
Or lost lover letters. And he definitely has a type. When Aaron receives a heart-shaped locket delivered inside a stuffed wolf, he probably should have considered a change of address.
I will endeavor to find out more about the titular antagonist in Creep 2 and The Creep Tapes on AMC. Apparently, Josef’s been a busy boy, making all sorts of new friends.
Get off the planet, or don’t! Makes no difference to me.
Directed by musician Tiny Lotus, Ash is an artsy, indulgent amalgam of sci-fi/horror plot points (from Alien, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) that never coalesces into anything terribly original or memorable.
Riya Ortiz (Eiza Gonzalez) is the only survivor of a crew of terra-farmers on KOI-442, a dark, distant planet nicknamed Ash, due to its volcanic activity. Her fellow farmers have been murdered and Riya’s own memories of the traumatic incident are bloody, strobe-light fragments, that Tiny Lotus thoughtfully inserts every few minutes or so.
She is soon joined by another crew member, Brion (Aaron Paul), who’s dropped in from the observation satellite after receiving a distress call. Is he here to help or does he have his own agenda?
Ash provides a teachable moment for aspiring directors. If you’re going with a tiny cast, a little time spent on character development would help immeasurably. Riya and Brion are cyphers in space, and might as well be Nancy and Sluggo for all we care.
A 50-50 chance that one of these nonentities has been infected by a vague assimilating presence from the planet’s defense system isn’t really bringing anything hot and tasty to the table.
Add to this a halting narrative told in flashback, a meandering pace, low lighting (when it’s not strobed), and an intrusive techno score, and you have ample reason to skip it.
Tiny Lotus has his moments as a visual stylist, creating a believably unstable alien landscape. But there’s nobody home, dramatically speaking.
When TL reheats a trope from a better movie, it’s just a bitter reminder that Alien, The Thing, etc, are superior examples of dynamic genre filmmaking—that we could be watching instead.
Whether or not Ash is a complete waste of time depends on one’s fondness for a concept that’s already used up several miles of celluloid, namely, who, what, where is the alien menace and who can I trust?
Trust me, you’re not missing anything interesting on planet Ash.
Remember, everything in the desert is trying to kill you.
Yuppie art photographer Alex Clark (Kai Lennox) is returning to the Mojave, in search of fresh inspiration. His artistic milieu includes sun-baked landscapes bereft of humanity, abandoned structures left to the forces of ruination.
Alex is seeking freedom, he explains to his wife Sam (Sara Lind) over the phone. She duly reminds him of his financial obligations awaiting him back in Los Angeles.
Trying to salvage the remains of his enthusiasm, Alex makes friends with Renny (Zachary Ray Sherman), and his blistering hot sister Susie (Ashley Smith), the next door neighbors at his seedy hotel in Yucca Valley.
And quicker than you can say Trap Door Spider, Alex obliviously falls under the influence of Renny, a diabolical desert rat with Manson eyes, freshly emerged from the depths of heck itself.
Renny, as we discover in about two seconds, is a 100 percent, 24-7 predator that sees the agreeable Alex as an easy mark—and so he is.
Back home, Sam hires troubled private investigator Harold Palladino (David Yow) to track down her absent hubby.
Writer-director Joshua Erkman has worked with Ty Segall (who composed the brassy soundtrack) as a video director and he brings a keenly developed eye to the minimalist, sunstroke noir of A Desert.
There is one shot in particular, of Renny sleeping shirtless in a culvert of old electronics gear, that absolutely screams “vampire in his coffin.” Yes, the sun is out, but this guy is as bloodthirsty as the next Count.
We are witness to all the expressive catharsis that Alex is seeking, even as he’s being stalked by one of the creepiest villains in recent memory. Zachary Ray Sherman’s portrayal of Renny is unnerving; a charming opportunist killer with a better game face than Norman Bates.
A Desert is visually dazzling and highly recommended, but upbeat it ain’t. Shit gets mighty grim out there. This moral wasteland is where weaklings go and are never heard from again, becoming a tiny part of the vicious and unforgiving topography.
Ray Milland won a Best Actor Oscar courtesy of his spirited dip into dipsomania in Billy Wilder’s Lost Weekend (1946), so let’s cut him some slack for Frogs, an unintentionally hilarious stinker from American International Pictures.
First things first: At no point in the film is anyone eaten by a giant frog. The poster is complete bullshit.
Since it’s a horror movie with an environmental message, Milland is cast as Jason Crockett, a venomous industrialist in a wheelchair ruling over a polluted private island plantation, fussed over by his feckless family intent on currying the old man’s financial favor.
Keeping Milland company is a naked-lipped Sam Elliott playing Pickett Smith, a hippie nature photographer in a canoe accidentally swamped by Clint Crockett (Adam Roarke), one of the patriarch’s progeny of sycophants and spoiled brats.
The exception is Karen Crockett (Joan Van Ark from Knot’s Landing), a lovely and luminous free spirit, who naturally gravitates to Smith, the stranger in the group, and the only other decent human being for miles.
It seems the senior Crockett wants his island free of frogs, and presumably snakes, spiders, gators, gulls, geckos, skinks, skunks, squirrels, and any other member of the animal kingdom that dares show its face.
“I still believe man is master of the universe,” he sneers at Smith.
Crockett instructs his minions to spray pesticides on the flora and fauna surrounding the estate. The flora and fauna don’t care for this one bit and mount a counter attack.
There is not a single sequence in the movie that isn’t punctuated (padded) with additional nature footage of creeping critters hopping and slithering closer to the Crockett house. Frogs are lobbed haphazardly into frame by production assistants, occasionally piling up in abundance, and photographed from menacing low angles to show they clearly mean business.
Directed by TV veteran George McCowan, Frogs boasts some of the most howlingly cheap and awful death scenes ever, rivaling poor Bela Lugosi wrestling an inanimate octopus in Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster.
I was reminded of this as I watched Stuart Martindale (George Skaff), a bald guy in a velour suit, forced to grapple with an unconscious crocodile.
A snapping turtle claims one victim! Another gets lost in the swamp chasing butterflies, and after what seems like several weeks of wandering and weeping, finally succumbs to a surfeit of snake bites.
Yet another of Crockett’s foppish relatives ends up poisoned in a closed greenhouse thanks to a bunch of reptiles shattering multiple bottles of industrial strength pesticide, as is their wont.
The best/worst demise, undoubtedly belongs to Michael Martindale (David Gilliam), which involves being cocooned by moss and having spiders spilled upon his person, including one right in the mouth.
As for Ray Milland, the conservative think-tank commander goes down with the ship, deserted by everyone including his dog. He is seen taking his final agonizing breath amidst another barrage of tossed toads, glaringly accompanied to the grave by Les Baxter’s shrieking, atonal score.
What a sorry way to croak!
Frogs isn’t so bad it’s good. But the low-rent laughs are all over the place, just like the titular terrors who pounce on Crockett’s star-spangled birthday cake, ruining his crappy family celebration.
Remember: Environment good! Old rich white men bad! Too bad this populist message didn’t help George McGovern in ’72.
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